Essay Contest Winner: How Retain Has Saved my Sanity

We recently held an essay contest inviting Micro Focus employees and customers to describe why they love using Micro Focus products. We wanted to know how our users were using Micro Focus products to make their lives—and the lives of their users—easier. Entries were sorted into solution groups and judged by the appropriate Solution Marketer.

This entry was selected as the first-place winner in the Information Archiving solution group. The author, Michael Sabal, received the first-place prize of a $350 Amazon Gift card as well as a free, Micro Focus community t-shirt.

Take a look at the winning entry below.

By: Michael Sabal

Earlier this year, Notations Clothing Company purchased Retain from Micro Focus to assist us with search and storage of over a decade’s worth of email. Prior to purchasing Retain, if I needed to look for a conversation thread across multiple mailboxes, I would have to first gain access to each user’s GroupWise account, then search in that account for the information we needed. If the user had archive mailboxes associated with their accounts, I would have to locate them, then make sure I didn’t disrupt the user’s normal settings, attach each archive mailbox in turn, and repeat the search over and over again until I had everything I needed back in the live mailbox. Adding to the tedious process of searching each GroupWise account individually, I had a few instances where I needed to export those messages into a PST file.

While certain versions of Outlook were able to interface with GroupWise directly, we decided to use IMAP access to handle the task. For some search jobs, this whole process easily took hundreds of hours to complete.

Fast forward to this year. Once the live mailboxes were loaded into Retain once with everything, we changed the job profile to only update messages changed within the past thirty days, and do that once a week.

The external tool to import the archive mailboxes was a cinch to use, once we learned how to configure the settings correctly. After a few emails to Retain’s support desk, we were well on our way. The same search and export job that took hundreds of hours before without Retain, could now be finished in just a few hours with Retain. There is so much more that Retain can do for us with message stubbing and deletion jobs that we haven’t implemented yet. This is a product that is paying for itself very quickly.

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Disclaimer: This content is not supported by Micro Focus. It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test it thoroughly before using it in a production environment.